


Song of Ice

by crossingwinter



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Gen, Implied Rhaegar/Lyanna, Perceived consent, Perceived non-consent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-20
Updated: 2012-11-04
Packaged: 2017-11-16 17:16:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/541906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lyanna Stark had three brothers, three brothers who loved her dearly and only ever wanted to protect her from the evils of the world.</p><p>A Threeshot of how Brandon, Ned, and Benjen remembered their sister after she disappeared.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Melody

**Author's Note:**

> Rereading this in 2014, I am realizing it's much less with the canon compliant than I thought it was when I wrote it. Ahh well, I still like it.

The hardest thing about Ned going away was Lyanna. 

She was six when they watched their middle brother ride south to Jon Arryn and the Eyrie, and she had not cried, the way that Father had warned him that she might. 

She had looked sad.  She did, after all, love Ned.  Perhaps almost as much as Brandon himself did.  But she did not cry.  And later that evening, when they had been eating quietly together, it was Lyanna who began laughing.

Brandon couldn’t even remember what about at this point—perhaps something had dropped on the ground, or Old Nan had made a face—he just remembered Lyanna’s voice ripping out of her in irresistible giggles, that Benjen caught like the common cold and soon he too was coughing out laughter.  Brandon had eventually succumbed himself.

Only Lyanna could make him forget the pain of Ned going away.  And he wasn’t entirely sure he liked it.

Lyanna liked to laugh.  She liked to play with the sounds her voice could make, and laughter seemed to be the best way to do that.  She could guffaw like a servant, or snicker daintily as she imagined southron ladies did; she could giggle like the young woman she was, but most often her laughter came from low in her belly and rose out of her throat with such force that Brandon sometimes wondered how someone so small could produce a sound so large.

The contours of her laughter were unlike anything he ever heard in Winterfell, and it sounded almost musical at times.  This never surprised him though, because when Lyanna was not laughing, she was singing. 

One of his earliest memories was of his mother singing to him and baby Ned in the strange creole spoken by many of the Hill Tribes—a language somewhere between the Old Tongue of the First of Men and the Common Tongue of Westeros.  She had told him that these were songs of ice, and, in his extreme youth, he thought she had meant the sword that so often sat at his father’s hip.  He was a summer child, and did not know what true ice was.

He learned though, the year that Lyanna was born.  She was born on a day so cold he still remembered the feeling that his toes might fall off if he didn’t wear more than one pair of socks. 

Her infant cries had not been musical, and he had wondered why his parents had chosen to have a girl, when another boy, someone like Ned, would be more fun.  In his earliest days, Ned had never cried half so much as Lyanna cried during the first months of her life.  But eventually, she had stopped, and it did not take long for Brandon to figure out why.

Lyanna had loved their mother’s songs.  She had burrowed into her mothers arms as a small toddler to feel the vibrations in her mother’s body and she had, after a certain point, began trying to imitate the sounds herself.  She hummed before she could talk, and the first sounds that she made (before the first words came) were the nonsense syllables that so often appeared in their mother’s lullabies.  It had taken her a long while to learn that these were not true words, but the words of songs—meaningless, though beautiful in their meaningless.

Sometimes to tease her, Brandon would still say things like “lele” and “rumtum” just to watch Lyanna’s face contort with a mixture of embarrassment and impatience. 

When their mother died birthing Benjen, she had taken it upon herself, all of three years old, to sing to her baby brother every night, as she had been sung to all her short life.  When Benjen announced that he was too old for such things, Lyanna sang anyway, but this time, in her room, or in the Godswood while soaking in the hot springs, her dark hair fanning out around her and her pale skin glowing in the moonlight.

The Godswood seemed holier when Lyanna sang there.

As they had grown older, Lyanna had become increasingly difficult.  She was not Ned.  She was not reliable in any way.  Sometimes, she would support him, other times she would challenge him, and whenever she did, there was laughter in her eyes.  Love too, but mostly laughter.  And Brandon had never quite figured out how to make her stand down. 

At first, he had said she needed to because she was older.  She had countered that older did not make him smarter.  Then he had said that she should listen to him because he was a man.  Her response was simply that that made her less inclined to listen to him.  At long last, he tried that he was the next Lord of Winterfell and thus deserved her respect.  She had simply raised an eyebrow, all of sixteen, and said that if Ned had his way, she would be the next Lady of Storm’s End, which merited just as much respect—if not more-so, because father the moment that Robert Baratheon placed his cloak around her shoulders she would be his Lady.  She added that this was likely to happen sooner than he would become Lord of Winterfell.

Brandon had thrown his hands up in frustration after that.  And she had laughed the fullest of her throaty laughs.

They had raced through the Wolfswood once.  Well, more than once, but Brandon was only thinking of one specific instance.  When she had taken the lead, she had burst into an extremely raunchy song that he was appalled that she knew.  She had almost been unable to hold the melody she was laughing so hard—the exhilaration of the pace, no doubt, or that she had finally managed to outstrip her older brother.

He didn’t know when it happened, but he had become so accustomed to the sound of her voice that its absence had been the first thing he had noticed at Harrenhal.

He had never thought that anything could have been harder than when his brother went south that first time.  He had been wrong.

Brandon wondered, as his throat closed, whether that was what the Dragon Prince had so liked in his sister.  Those purple eyes that looked even more haunted when he had sung a song so melancholy that women throughout the hall began to weep.  Had he liked the laughing, joyful songs that Lyanna so often sang, if only to herself?  Had he taken her to make her sing for him before he fucked her?

The last thing that Brandon Stark heard was laughter.  It was cruel, and uncontrollable and so unlike his sister.  But when air no longer reached his lungs, he thought he heard, from the back of his head, Lyanna in song.


	2. Rhythm

Every time he rides north, he hears the cracking of trees and he thinks of her.

She was the one who first pointed it out to him.  He had been seven and they had been in the Godswood, playing at swords.  “You hear that Benjen?” she had hissed at him as she tossed him back the wooden practice sword he had lost _again_. 

“No.”

“That cracking.  That’s the trees.”  And she had struck at him again.  He had barely had time to raise his sword.

She had been better than him.  It was hardly unpredictable—she was older, bigger, and had more to prove than he did.  But that wasn’t why she was better.

She surprised him.

(Lyanna surprised everyone.)

She would move in ways that Brandon never did when Brandon was teaching him, and she would catch him unawares every time.  Once, when he had frustratedly asked her how, she had laughed in his face.

(Lyanna always laughed.)

“Oh, silly Benjen.  If I tell you, then you’d know!  Then you’d be prepared!”

Benjen hated being the youngest at moments like that. 

In his childhood, when he fought with Lyanna in the Godswood—away from the prying eyes of Brandon (who would also have laughed) and their father (who would have shouted at Lyanna to put her sword down)—he could try and forget that he was the youngest son, the least important.  But it almost never worked. 

Brandon was the eldest—handsome, brave, charming.  Ned was the second son, the one who was being fostered and was thus beloved in his absence.  Benjen could barely remember Ned at all, but still lived in his shadow.  And then, there was Lyanna.

Lyanna wanted so much to be like Brandon that she did not seem to notice that Benjen just wanted to be like her.  And this was never more apparent than in the Godswood, when she would strike with the ferocity that he had only ever seen in Brandon, and would not even tell him the secret of her success.

She had taken such joy in the sounds of the wooden practice swords striking at each other.  She would remark, when they had finished, that if you hit the swords together in different ways, they would emit different pitches.

“It’s almost like a song, Benjen!” she had said excitedly as they had slipped back into the armory together to put the swords away.  “If you hit them the right way, it almost makes a melody.  A sword song!”

Lyanna often tapped away on tables when she was bored.  When waiting for food at dinner, when waiting for her maid to tell her how to make her stitches finer, when leaning on the railing watching Brandon train in the courtyard of Winterfell, her fingers were always tap-tap-tapping away.  Their father often told her to stop, but she almost always continued, though sometimes the fingers would tap away on her leg or her breastbone instead.

She always remarked upon the rhythms that she heard, whether it was the cracking of the trees in the Godswood, the dripping of icicles off the roof of the armory, the footfall of their horses in the Wolfswood, her ears were always attentive, and she always shared what she heard.  Music was made to be shared, she had said.  And rhythm is music.

She had told him, in the end.  But not until they were older.  When Benjen was thirteen, and Lyanna was newly betrothed, she had sat down with him under the Heart Tree in the Godswood.  They had sat in silence for a while, but it was the good kind of silence—at least that was what he had thought.

At last, she had spoken.

“It’s the rhythm.”

“What?”

“The rhythm.  You can hear it in the practice yards.  Everyone always fights in four.  One two three, four, hit, strike, left, right.  It’s like they don’t even realize that they are dancing to the same beat.  If you speed up, they speed up because you are only quickening the song.  But if you change the meter, if you dance in five instead of four, or in seven instead of eight, it throws them off guard.  One (two) one (two ) one (two three)! One (two) one (two) one (two three)! Hit wait, hit wait, strike and wait, hit wait, hit wait, strike and wait.”  She tapped the rhythm out on his knee.  “That’s why I can still beat you, even though you’re bigger than me now.”

He had been bigger than her.  The year he turned thirteen he had grown nearly a foot, and had stood taller even than Brandon in the end.  In the end he hadn’t been so tall as Ned though.  He had always supposed that some of Robert Baratheon’s height had rubbed off on Ned.

“One (two) one (two) one (two three),” he had muttered under his breath, and she had laughed again.  It had been a quiet laugh, almost a sad one. 

“That’s right.  If that’s the rhythm you fight to, they’ll never know when you will strike.”  After she had pointed it out, he saw it everywhere.  From training new recruits at Castle Black to exchanging blows with Wildlings north of Craster’s Keep, everyone except Lyanna (and now Benjen) fought in four.  He fancied himself a formidable opponent, and he thanked Lyanna for it. 

No one had expected that she would disappear with Prince Rhaegar.

Even after all these years, after all the stories, after Ned’s description of their sister’s last moments, after Robert’s mourning, he was still not completely convinced that it hadn’t been Lyanna’s idea.


	3. Lyric

He could barely hear the jeers, but he could see them.  He could see lips moving and he could see their words _traitor_ , _murderer, kill him!_ as clearly as any words he had ever seen in his life.

He looked out upon a sea of rage and realized, knowing that he would die never seeing Cat again, or Robb, or Bran, or Rickon, that this was somehow not as bad.

Somewhere in the back of his memory, he heard a laugh he had not heard in many years.

In his delirium in the Black Cells, he had heard her final plea— _Promise me, Ned!—_ but he had not heard her laughter at all, not once since Harrenhal.

He would have wondered why she was laughing now, if he had not already known. 

 _No_ , laughed the Lyanna in his mind _, traitor is too easy.  You must go more for the heart of the matter.  In this, you are not a traitor, you are a loyal turncloak.  And let us not even go into murderer, shall we.  It is simply inaccurate, unless killing Ser Arthur Dayne in a duel could now be deemed murder._

Lyanna had always had a way with words.  Her letters, when they had reached him in the Eyrie were always the most vivid, the most poetic, the most creative.  She had made even learning new stitching patterns, the etiquette of cutlery at big feasts seem as interesting as her clandestine fights with Benjen in the Godswood.  “She could have been a poet!” Robert had once said of the letter she had sent him following the confirmation of their betrothal.  Ned had shaken his head and corrected Robert—She could have written songs.  Ballads, odes that played at your heartstrings like a lyre.

Maybe he was turning poetical, like Lyanna, in his last moments.

His voice had never been as strong as Lyanna’s.  He had never been so sure of words, never felt comfortable asserting himself in speech the way that she, Robert, and Brandon all had.  In court, his voice was always too quiet. 

It had been loud enough when he had declared treason, and he wondered if Lyanna hadn’t given him the strength to say the words that Lord Varys had fed him.  He wondered if it hadn’t been Lyanna who had allowed him to deviate from his script, and use phrases that worsened his crimes because they sounded more convincing that way.

He could have laughed, but she had taken most of the laughter from his life.  She had taken music and song (though Sansa wished so desperately to bring them back), and loving defiance (Arya’s specialty) from his life.  She had taken Father, Brother, Sister, and, to some extent, Mother from his life, leaving him completely alone—the lone wolf in Winterfell.

A lone wolf in a place that felt as little like home as the Eyrie had at times.

What was the Godswood without Lyanna?  What was the courtyard without Brandon?  What was the Wolfswood without Benjen?  What was the Great Hall without Lord Rickard?  He felt a pretender, a fool, and never more so than when he was forced to his knees on the steps of the Great Sept to a seven-faced God he did not believe in.

Dimly he was aware that it must be unholy to these Seven (the ones with all the rules) for his blood to be spilled on their doorstep.  The image of blood seeping over marble was one that he could barely stomach.  His blood would be washed away only by the rain, and it would flow through the streets of King’s Landing, unblocked and unabsorbed.

Red on White.

Like the Weirwood in the Godswood, like Cat’s maiden’s blood on the sheet at their bedding, like Lyanna, pale as death when he had found her in the end, the last of her blood flowing out from between her legs and the squalling of a child coming from the arms of the wetnurse Wylla.

Well, he had kept his promise.  He had never told Cat, he had never told Robert, he had never even told Jon, though he had asked. 

Ned had always found it so interesting that one who was so gifted with speech and wordplay had produced a child so quiet.

Once on a snowy night soon after he had returned to Winterfell, when he had thought Cat asleep (they had shared a bed in winter for warmth, even though they had not loved—not yet), he had roused himself.  He had crossed quietly into the room across the hall, where Jon and Robb had slept, curled around each other in their infancy.  Well, Robb slept.  Jon’s eyes were open, silently looking at the shadows cast by the flickering firelight.  His eyes were as grey as the shadows themselves, as grey as Lyanna’s had been.

And he had sung, voice crackling and wavering.  It was a song his mother had sung to him, but he sang it not for Robb, and not even, truly, for Jon, whose eyes had begun to droop the moment that he had started the lullaby.  He sang it for Lyanna, because she would never have forgiven him if her son had not known music. 

Cat had found him like that—the cold had awoken her.  He liked to think that that was the moment she began to love him, kneeling beside their son, singing a northern song to him, a sign of raw emotion she had never seen before.

He had almost forgotten the words when he had noticed Cat in the doorway, clutching a cloak around herself.  She had been beautiful in her wonder of him, and it had almost taken his breath away.  But then Lyanna’s voice, a child’s voice singing to Benjen, had crept into his ears and he found the words again—his voice stronger this time.

And there it was again.

 _Promise me, Ned!_  

But it was not that last promise, that haunting promise.  No. 

This one was a promise from Harrenhal, when she had laughed in the face of the Dragon Prince and told him that his song was pretty enough, but that he could have chosen more fitting lyrics.  “Promise me that if I do not teach my children what real lyrics are, you will send me a scolding letter, like the ones you sent from the Eyrie.”

He had laughed with her then.  They both had known that he could never scold her half so well as their father did, even if he tried.  There was no such thing as scolding Lyanna, no such thing as tempering her with words.  She could turn them right back at you with the twist of a verb or the adjustment of an adjective.

He remembered the look on Prince Rhaegar’s face more clearly than he could remember the look on Brandon’s.  The Prince, who was ever reserved, had raised an eyebrow at Lyanna.  She had only laughed harder at that.  Finally, when at last she had calmed, she shrugged her shoulders, thrown an arm around Ned and clarified, simply, “Ned takes care of me.  Ned makes sure I regret nothing in the end and makes sure that I never forget what I should remember.”  Ned had never felt so proud of his sister’s love as at that moment.

Brandon had said something indignant, and Benjen had piped up about always being there to protect Lyanna, but it was Rhaegar he remembered.  “To be so lucky.”  The Prince had made his excuses and strolled away, and none of the brothers thought any more about it.

There had been no letter, no note in the end.  Ned had no way to send her scolding ravens, or even pleas that she should come back, back to him, to father, to Brandon and Benjen, to the Godswood, to Robert, to safety, to childhood.

He had known from the moment that she had disappeared that there would never be any going back.  He remembered Robert’s heartbreak, he remembered Brandon’s rage, he remembered Benjen’s confusion, but most of all, he remembered Lyanna, and how, even when dying, the words that she spun left him no choice but to do what she wanted him to.

And in the end, he would die, fittingly, the way Lyanna had died—with red on white and disappointed hope in his heart.


End file.
